Scripting News for 9/2/2006

Gandhi: “Where there is injustice, I always believed in fighting. The question is, do you fight to change things or do you fight to punish?”

When you fight to punish nothing is going to change, if anything the positions will harden, making change less likely. Gandhi also said you must become the change you seek. Indeed. That’s the pied piper thing. Doing what you ask others to do might be harder than you think, you can’t find out until you do it yourself. Then your experience can guide others. Want more women speakers at tech conferences? Okay, have a tech conference, and make that one of your goals, perhaps your primary goal. You have to do it. There are no shortcuts.

Cringely: “Sometime in the next 30 days this column will morph overnight into a blog.”

I’ve heard the New New Internet described as a fantastic Web 2.0 parody site, and it is that, but it also is (apparently) a real conference, whose purpose appears to be meta-meta. In other words, it purports to teach you to have meta-excitement, or excitement about people getting excited. I guess that’s only if the people putting it on are actually excited themselves, but with headlines like: “An All-Star Cast of Web 2.0 Players Will Descend on Tyson’s Corner,” how could you doubt that they were genuinely faking excitement?

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” is my favourite Ghandi quote.🙂
Dave, as I once again see synchronicity in our work, I offer the pipe of peace.
And I like it when you get philosophical.

There’s an interesting concept in Lacan’s psychoanalythic theory stating that, since the psyche is organized in terms of language, in order for something to exist, that something must have a name (actually that’s not exactly what Lacan says, it’s just one of the thousands of conclusions one may reach after trying to read his stuff – trust me, I know).

In the technology field, this is so true: take the example of AJAX. It has been around for ages, since IE4. But it took Jesse James Garrett writing an article about it for it to actually “exist”. And why has he thought of it in the first place? Because he wanted to sell the concept to a client and how can you sell something that doesn’t exist? You just can’t. Ergo, AJAX. Now it has a name. Now, because you can name it, that cool browser behavior on Google Maps seems more tangible, even though it’s been around for a while.

I am sure we can think of a thousand examples of such things in the technology world. But you don’t need to go too far – Dave Winer is pulling another AJAX on us as we speak.